Day: February 13, 2018

Carlos Campos arrived in the U.S. when he was 13 years old – alone and undocumented – but now the Honduran fashion designer and his elegant collections are a staple of New York’s Fashion Week. Fashion Week runs thru 2/16. Faith Lapidus has more.
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Wang Zhuyin studies 10 hours a day preparing for a series of tests to obtain a U.S. physician’s license. But like millions of young Chinese adults, the 26-year-old has found a new way to cope with the pressure: an online game about a frog.

A frog that’s perpetually on vacation.

Wang’s diversion, the Japanese mobile game “Travel Frog,” has attracted a massive following in China by speaking to a desire for a more passive existence among harried young people that some have termed “Buddhist style” for its desired goal of Zen-like serenity.

The game has only two scenes, a loft home and a courtyard where users can collect clover leaves to buy food and other travel supplies for their frog. There isn’t much else a user can do, either. The virtual frog randomly spends time reading a book at home, eating or going on vacation around Japan. Since users have no control over their frog’s behavior, waiting takes up most of the playing time.

“When your frog goes sightseeing, there is nothing you can do but go with the flow,” said Wang, a native of the high-tech center of Hangzhou outside Shanghai. “This is similar to the situation young people are facing. Suffocated by stress, we learn to pretend we don’t care.”

The game’s popularity underscores the degree of pressure Chinese millennials face in a highly competitive society where stability and opportunity have become ever more elusive.

Developed by Nagoya-based Japanese company Hit-Point, Travel Frog — also known as Tabi Kaeru — has become the most downloaded free game app in China, despite never having been translated into Chinese.

The game’s simplicity has users enthralled. Wang and others describe a sense of healing when gallivanting frogs send photos from their trips, or just relax at home.

The frog “doesn’t interact with you or talk to you. You just watch the frog living its own life,” said Jia Weiwei, 37, who works with autistic children in Beijing. “There isn’t a lot of information, which gives you plenty of space for imagination.”

Jia has studied an online translation guide and checks her phone regularly to see whether her frog will surprise her by sending a photo or bringing home souvenirs.

Psychologist Hai Ming says the popularity of the game shows that human relations have declined in an increasingly data-driven digital society.

“Behind every frog-raising player is a lonely person,” Hai said. “How do you externalize your loneliness, your indecision? Through the frog.”

On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, the topic (hash)TravelFrog(hash) has received over 1.96 billion views. According to Travel Frog developer Mayuko Uemura, Travel Frog has racked up about 30 million downloads on Apple’s App Store and Google Play since its launch in November. Fully 95 percent of downloads of the game from the App Store were in China.

“We were hoping to some extent that people overseas would be able to enjoy this game as well, but I would never have imagined that it would become so popular with people in China,” Uemura said.

The company is now considering producing an international version that could be tailored to appeal to local audiences, she said.

Social media have played an important role in the game’s success, said Chenyu Cui, a game analyst with IHS Markit in Shanghai.

Gamers can show off on Chinese social media sites by comparing photos of their frogs’ “travels,” Cui said.

Some users refer to the frog as their child and will worry if it hasn’t been home for even two days.

“It connects with people’s common experience,” said Shao Yuanyu, 32, a Taiwanese doctor based in Beijing. “Now I know how my mom felt when she waited for me to come home.”

For young people living in China’s fast-paced modern society, the game provides a sense of connection, said Xu Ziwei, a counselor from the mental health center at Beijing’s Renmin University.

“To some extent, you feel that you have a stable relationship with the frog. If it leaves, it will always come back, it will send you a postcard,” Xu said.

Not all are as positive. The game and the social trends it embodies run counter to the ruling Communist Party’s frequent exhortations to the public to strive for economic advancement. In a speech last year, President Xi Jinping called on young people to “write a vivid chapter in your tireless endeavors to serve the interests of the people.”

The party’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, stated in a recent Weibo post that young people should spend their time enriching themselves “instead of just being a lonely frog-raising person.”

But others see the frog game and the popularity of “Buddhist style” thinking as examples of young Chinese expressing a newfound independence. People born in the 1990s are largely better off than earlier generations of Chinese and they’re searching for meaning beyond material wealth, said Jia, the frog raiser in Beijing.

“This is like the western lifestyle we always envy: to be able to really be ourselves and not care about how others judge us,” Jia said.

“The ‘Buddhist style’ doesn’t mean a lack of pursuits or simply giving up,” Jia said. “I think it’s a spiritual pursuit. It’s not harmful if it makes people more at peace.”
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Erin Entrada Kelly’s “Hello, Universe,” a nuanced account of a diverse group of middle school students and their unexpected encounters, has won the John Newbery Medal for the outstanding children’s book of 2017. The Randolph Caldecott Medal for best illustration went to Matthew Cordell and his near-wordless story of a girl and the wolf pup she saves, “Wolf in the Snow.”

The awards were announced Monday by the American Library Association, which has gathered in Denver for its annual mid-winter meeting. Both the Newbery and Caldecott medals are more than 80 years old, with previous winners including Jacqueline Woodson’s “Brown Girl Dreaming” and Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” 

On Monday, Woodson who received the Laura Ingalls Wilder award for lifetime achievement and Nina LaCour’s “We Are Okay” was given the Michael L. Printz Award for best young adult literature. Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give,” one of last year’s top-selling young adult novels, was cited twice. It won a William C. Morris Award for best debut book for teens and an Odyssey Award for best audiobook.

Renee Watson’s “Piecing Me Together” won the Coretta Scott King Award for outstanding book by an African-American. The King award for best illustrator went to Ekua Holmes for “Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets.” Eloise Greenfield, whose dozens of books include “Honey, I Love” and “In the Land of Words,” won the King award for lifetime achievement.

The Pura Belpre Award for best Latino book was given to “Lucky Broken Girl,” by Ruth Behar. The Pura Belpre illustrator prize went to Juana Martinez-Neal and “La Princesa and the Pea.”
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A Catholic nun waits eight hours each day at a folding table, ready for a call but praying nothing has happened to cause the phone to ring.

Her office, the “Gender Equality Support Center,” a tiny trailer tucked between a bathroom and a police post under the ski lift at the Phoenix Snow Park, is a nondescript acknowledgment of the revolution in women’s rights that, outside the Olympic gates, is thundering through the world.  

Sungsook Kim — who goes by her religious name, Sister Droste — speaks little English. But to describe her mission, she says the name of the American movement: “me too.” 

The Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang arrives amid the reckoning that has brought down celebrities, politicians and the entire board of U.S.A Gymnastics. NBC star Matt Lauer was fired for sexual misconduct, and his accuser said the harassment began at the last Winter Olympics, in Sochi. 

During the Summer Games in Rio, two athletes were accused of assaulting housekeepers. A horrified world recently watched dozens of women and girls, some of them Olympians, describe in detail how Larry Nassar, the gymnastics doctor, had sexually abused them for decades as layers of elite athletic organizations failed to stop it.

“The whole world just got a front row seat to a master class in trauma,” said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a former Olympic swimmer and activist calling on Olympic committees to do much more to protect vulnerable athletes. 

“This is what trauma does. This is what it looks like,” she says. “It stops professional careers, it stops somebody’s education, it stops people from being close to other people, it invades their ability to feel safe.” 

A solution begins   

So this year, for the first time, there is an organized and advertised contingent of offices designed to help sexual assault victims dotted around the sprawling Olympics venues — from clinics that cater to world-class athletes to Sister Droste’s four trailers, organized by the local community for the army of 14,000 volunteers, most of them young, 70 percent of them female. 

“‘(hash)metoo’ allowed us all to see that it’s not the victim’s fault, being sexually harassed. It’s not because of their appearance. It gives courage to the victims,” Droste said through a translator. 

So far they have responded to four reports of harassment, Droste said, the details of which she could not describe because of confidentiality rules, but said they were not severe. 

“Having equal rights,” the sister said, “men and women, makes it possible for us to accomplish freedom.”

Olympic organizers have finally decided it’s time to get serious. On Sunday, Prince Feisal of Jordan, a board member on the International Olympic Committee, said the Olympic body should pursue the fight against sexual assault and harassment as seriously as it does doping. 

“The current scandal begs the question: Why aren’t we doing more?” he said.

 The United States Olympic Committee has come under withering criticism in the wake of the Nassar abuse scandal. Aly Raisman, a three-time Olympic gold medalist assaulted by the doctor, publicly rebuked the committee for failing to spot and stop the abuse, and for not reaching out to the victims once it was made known. 

This happened in a prosperous country with a powerful Olympic committee and the resources to protect athletes, Feisal said. “Imagine countries and federations who’ve got nothing.” 

The International Olympic Committee launched a program last year aimed at coaching athletic organizations around the world how to implement policies to protect vulnerable athletes. In 2016, they hastily put together a “safeguarding” program for the summer games in Rio, in which an officer was available to field allegations of abuse and route them to medical services or law enforcement. 

But the plan was approved in June and the Olympics began in July, and they did not have time to effectively spread the word about the program, said Susan Greinig, the safeguarding officer. 

As she watched the Nassar saga unfold on television, she remembers feeling a mix of regret and motivation. 

“I just thought, if only we could have put this help in place earlier to save these people. But they are an example of future potential victims that we will save, that we will give a voice to,” she said. “Out of every evil there can be some good that comes out of it.” 

This year, she has an office in the Olympic villages, and marches around with a pin on her jacket that reads: “Need to talk?” A sign is plastered to her office door says “I see, I hear, I speak.” The posted hotline number for athletes to report sexual abuse routes to her cell phone and she checks it every few seconds. 

Three days into the Games, no one had called it yet.

 “After these Games, if I didn’t have any calls, you could read two ways into that: You could believe people still didn’t dare, or there just weren’t any incidents that happened during the games,” she said. “Obviously, I prefer to believe the second.” 

‘They are listening now’

The odds are that among the women chasing medals on Pyeongchang’s slopes and slides, some have stories to tell. Scientific research shows that the more elite an athlete is, the more likely they are to be victims of assault, Greinig knows, because the higher an athlete climbs the more they have to lose. Abusers know that, and exploit it. The Olympics is a natural home to the kind of power dynamics that foster abuse: coaches to athletes, athletes to maids. 

Greinig does not expect the Olympics would be the venue most would choose to blow the whistle on longstanding abuse. Athletes are away from home, focused on winning, surrounded by strangers. 

But she hopes their efforts send a signal — to victims that they will be believed and protected, and to abusers that the sporting world is getting serious about the issue, even if it is overdue. She has worked for the IOC for 21 years, with a focus on preventing sexual abuse since 2004. 

“It used to be frustrating to make people listen,” she said. “But they are listening now.”  

She is compiling a list of committees and federations as they take steps to implement protections for athletes — a sort of shaming technique she hopes forces slow-moving organizations to get on board as the (hash)metoo movement spreads from the United States around the globe. 

Sister Droste, 50,  has watched women’s rights in her country slowly improve. Women are more educated now, more confident, yet remain “far behind” other countries. Outside the Olympics, she works in a hotline counseling center for victims of sexual violence, so she confronts the inequities every day. When she looks around, she still sees most positions of power in her country filled by men.

But she is encouraged by signs that the (hash)metoo movement landed last month in South Korea. 

Seo Ji-hyeon, a 45-year-old prosecutor, went on national television to say she was groped at a funeral by a high-ranking government official. When she reported it, instead of punishing him, her superiors demoted her by sending her away to work in a fishing village. Her story inspired others to come forward in recent days — a lawmaker, a university student, a news reporter.

She hopes any of the thousands of volunteers in her charge know they have a voice now, too. Meanwhile, she runs four centers during the Olympics that are staffed by 29 professional volunteer counselors working in conjunction with medical teams and law enforcement. 

“I am praying to God that nothing happens,” Droste says. “But we are here.” 
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Dallas Brown can still see the bullets coming for him 50 years later, smacking into the dirt at his feet as north Vietnamese soldiers fired on his platoon during an ambush deep in the jungle.

Minutes later, as the deadly firefight wound down, Brown and his fellow soldiers in the 101st Airborne would be immortalized.

In one of the most searing images of the Vietnam War, Brown grimaces as he lies on the ground with a back injury. Not far away, a platoon sergeant raises his arms to the heavens, seemingly seeking divine help.

Landing on the front page of The New York Times, the black and white image by Associated Press freelancer Art Greenspon gave Americans back home an unflinching look at the conditions soldiers endured in what would become the war’s deadliest year. Captured on April 1, 1968, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and appeared prominently in Ken Burns’ recent Vietnam War documentary.

But for the young Americans who have decided to talk about it a half-century later, it was merely a moment in another sweltering day in a Southeast Asian jungle with well-hidden enemies all around. Some of them have spent years putting the experience in perspective.

“When I look at that picture now, I say, ‘If I can survive that, I can survive anything,'” said Tim Wintenburg, who in the photo helps carry a wounded soldier over brush hacked away to create a helicopter landing zone.

Sgt. Maj. Watson Baldwin has his arms raised to guide in a helicopter that would take away the wounded men, including one shot in the leg by the Vietnamese soldier who was firing at Brown. Baldwin died in 2005, according to Fort Campbell officials who recently tracked down soldiers in the photo.

Brown, who lives near Nashville, and Wintenburg, of Indianapolis, met with an Associated Press reporter at Fort Campbell in Kentucky to recount the events surrounding the photo — their first news media interviews ever on the war.

After he received his draft notice in 1965, Wintenburg visited a recruiting office and was told he looked “like Airborne material.”

By early 1968, he was 20 years old and on the front lines.

Brown, who was 18 when he landed in Vietnam, remembers being inspired by “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” He was encouraged to go through airborne training. Both men ended up at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne.

In the spring of 1968, Brown and Wintenburg’s squad was in the dangerous A Shau Valley on a weekslong “search and destroy” mission, meaning they never took prisoners. Firefights were commonplace.

Brown recalls their battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, telling them before one mission: “You get a body count, you get a prize.”

“To my knowledge we might have taken a handful of prisoners the whole time we was in Vietnam,” Brown said.

The soldiers were hiking up a slippery mountain trail after a monsoon when they paused to eat lunch.

Brown, sitting on his rucksack with his M-16 rifle across his lap, thought he saw a sapling move down a ravine. He didn’t feel any wind. He switched his rifle to full-automatic as an enemy fighter stepped into view.

Known in the platoon as “hillbilly” for his Tennessee drawl and proficiency with a rifle, Brown fired on the first north Vietnamese soldier, killing him and then another behind him. He was reloading when a third enemy fighter fired back.

“You know you see these movies where you see clods of dirt jumping up? I could see them, I mean they was coming right at me and that’s when I got off that rucksack,” Brown said. “I thought, this guy, he means to kill me as sure as the world.”

Brown lunged for cover, and a bullet struck the leg of a soldier who had been behind him. Once the ambush was put down, Brown carried the wounded man up the hill, injuring his back on the way.

Brown grimaced as the photo was snapped. Wintenburg, who had lost his helmet, helped the wounded soldier up to the landing spot. He glanced back toward Greenspon.

Greenspon now lives in Connecticut. He declined to be interviewed, saying the soldiers should always be the focus of any story about the photograph.

Brown and Wintenburg each spent about a year in Vietnam, and both men struggled with anxiety for years. But now, 50 years later, they relish opportunities to reunite with fellow 101st Airborne members.

Brown has a copy of the photo hanging in his home, and he has plenty of stories of how he convinced relatives and friends that he’s in it. A few years ago, Brown’s granddaughter and her boyfriend — now her husband — asked about it. Seeing it through their eyes reminded him of the growing pride he now takes in his piece of history.

Wintenburg shares that pride, though he is perhaps more sanguine about what led him to that moment.

“We didn’t really have a choice back then,” he said. “We did what we had to do.”
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